Category Archives: Software Engineering

One of the things I love about newer languages like Ruby and Scala (and to a degree Python and Groovy) are the language features that allow you to dial conciseness up or down for readability. Take for instance the typical … Continue reading →

Update 8/7/2010 PhoneGap apps are still being allowed in the app store! It’s not the right solution for every app (for example we went native with the Common Sense Media app), but I still think PhoneGap is really cool. I’ve … Continue reading →

At Common Sense Media I wanted to get some functional testing up and running that didn’t require a lot of user training for the QA folks. I also wanted those tests to run in our Rightscale/Amazon EC2 hosted Hudson continuous … Continue reading →

Update 6/14/2007: Dion Almaer has published a nice Javascript helper which makes working with spreadsheets much nicer, I’ve moved my stuff to it and it’s a big improvement over using the Google JSON api directly. Publishing dynamic content on your … Continue reading →

Update 2/5/07: I’ve since discovered five plugins that address this very problem with slightly different approaches (the latter two store a permalink in the table, good for mutable titles): acts_as_sluggable acts_as_urlnameable acts_as_slugable acts_as_friendly_param permalink_fu Obie’s recent post on search engine … Continue reading →

The Java Posse hosted a great podcast interview with the authors of JRuby: Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo. Additionally you get to hear what Tor Norbye is up to with his work on NetBeans Ruby integration and it looks like … Continue reading →

I had a piece of data import code in Wind and Tides that I just knew could be cleaner and more elegant. Last week I submitted it to Jamis and Michael who write the Rails Way blog and their refactoring … Continue reading →

One thing I love about Ruby (and really miss when working in Java) is its interactive command line interpreter irb (or script/console if you’re using Rails). I really wish irb had tab completion and saved history configured by default out … Continue reading →

With all of the hype around Ajax it’s easy to think you might need an MVC framework with baked in Ajax support like Rails ActionPack or JBoss Seam to make Ajax easy. However, libraries like Prototype (which is what Rails … Continue reading →

It always drives me nuts when I get a Javascript error in Internet Explorer that I can’t reproduce in Firefox because I’m used to debugging Javascript in Firefox with Firebug. I finally had to buckle down and figure out how … Continue reading →

About Me

I live in San Francisco and am the Co-Founder of Two Bit Labs where we develop iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile apps for our clients. I love the mix of team leadership and working as a hands-on contributor. My technical passions include Swift, Kotlin, Ruby, Cloud Computing, and open-source software.

I also love to sail and my wife, daughter, and I sailed out the Golden Gate in 2007 on our 38 foot Hans Christian cutter (sailboat) on a 3 year cruise. Read about it at http://sailsugata.com.